Poster: Scoping Environment to Assist 60 GHz Link Deployment

Abstract

Line-of-Sight blockage by human body is a severe challenge to enable robust 60 GHz directional links. Beamsteering is one feasible solution to overcome this problem by electronically steering phased-array beam towards Non-Line-of-Sight. However, effectiveness of beamsteering depends on the link deployment and a lack of assessment of steering effectiveness may render the link completely blacked-out during human blockage. In this poster, we propose a new technique called BeamScope, that predicts best possible location for a randomly deployed link in an indoor environment without the need of any explicit war-driving. BeamScope first characterizes the environment exploiting measurement from the randomly deployed reference location and then predicts the performance in unobserved locations to suggest a possible re-deployment. The environment characterization is captured through a novel metric and prediction is achieved via how this metric is shared between the reference location and unobserved locations. Our preliminary results show promising accuracy of identifying the best possible alternate location for 60 GHz link to achieve a robust connection during human blockage.